How to Digitize and Use Video Sources

The Steps

1. Plug the camera power unit into a 110 electrical socket. In doing so, be careful not to unplug or turn off other workstations.
2. Turn the camera on. Use the small switch on the top of the camera.
3. Turn on the power unit to which the camera is connected. The switch is located at one end. For this exercise, it does not whether the other switch is set to TV or VCR.
4. Point the camera at your target, such as a person's face or an image taped to the wall.

   If you use 7100/AV and 8100 AV workstations:
   

   • Connect the wire with the yellow jack from the camera setup to the video input plug ( a grey plug hanging off the back of the computer with IN stamped in the plastic) of the computer workstation.

   If you use Quadra 660AV workstations; and Mac7500 and Mac8500 stations:
   

   • Connect the wire with the RCA jack from the camera setup, video out, to the video input plug, a yellow RCA jack with IN or input next to it indicates the place to put a wire with incoming video.

   Software Setup Ingredients.
   

5. You need to start an application called Video Monitor.
6. If your hardware connections and switch settings are correct, and your camera is working, this should quickly place the view through the camera in a window on your computer screen. Adjust your camera focus and distance appropriately.
7. Check preferences in the menu bar and decide if you want the digitized work saved as a file on the hard drive or placed on the clipboard for immediate pasting into a document.
8. Assuming that you want the image on the clipboard for immediate cropping and adjusting, start up the application called ClarisWorks. When given the choice of which Clarisworks application, choose Paint or Draw. This opens a blank window on your screen that will hold your image and allow you to work on it. The ClarisWorks Draw and Paint applications are both useful and each has features the other does not.
9. Size and locate the windows for the VideoMonitor and the ClarisWorks application so that you can see at least a portion of each window.

   "Cooking the Image" or Digitize and Use It
   

10. To capture the image currently seen by your camera, hold down the Apple key (to the left of the space bar) and tap the C key, a process abbreviated as Command C, otherwise known as Copy. If the speaker sound level is set high enough you will hear a clicking sound imitating the sound of clicking a single lens reflex camera. The screen may freeze making it impossible to move the cursor for a brief moment. Your image is placed in an invisible part of computer memory known as the clipboard.
11. There is a slight delay between pressing Command C to copy and the completion of the digitizing process. When trying to capture expressions on faces, the expression must last longer than it normally might to be captured properly. Experiment to see the effect that I am describing.
12. Now move the cursor inside the Paint window and click once to make this the active window. Instead of Command C, now do a Command V to insert what is on the clipboard. Your digitized image now appears in the Paint window for cropping, resizing or other modifications. If you do not like this image and want to try again, double-click on the image of an eraser in the toolbox on the side of the window which will erase this entire window and you can complete this digitizing process again.
13. If you like the image, there are many commands within ClarisWorks that can be learned to modify it. One commonly used procedure is to crop an image, that is, to cut out just what you want and/or remove the part of the image that you don't want.
14. To crop the image, select the crop tool, the marquee tool in the tool box next to the lasso (which will also carry out a similar function). Click and drag across the part of the image you wish to retain. This leaves an animated line around your chosen section of the image. Give a command X which copies the chosen section to the clipboard but removes it from the screen. Then double-click on the eraser which clears from the window the section not chosen. Finally, do a Command V to put back in the window what was put on the clipboard.
15. If this proves satisfactory, do any last necessary image changes, then you can copy the image to the clipboard. Setup a word processor window and paste your image (Command V), into its proper place between your paragraphs.
16. Save and/or print this updated word processing file. Now when you print, the image will come out along with your text. When printing, setup up greyscale printing in the print dialog box, which provides a wide range of tones of grey to make images look more accurate.